For decades she has used an image of okra on her business cards as a symbol of her family's African roots and her own connection to the continent's cuisine. But as the green, finger-shaped vegetable pops up on menus across the United States as an emblem of southern American cooking, the true narrative of the plant is at risk of disappearing, Harris says, speaking at a recent conference on food culture and history at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro.
While gumbo, the flagship dish of New Orleans, is usually thickened with okra, the technique is actually an adaptation of soupikandia, a Senegalese soupy stew slave cooks prepared in plantation kitchens for both themselves and their owners. Her own mission is to make sure that the contribution of slaves to America's culinary traditions isn't forgotten. The primary challenge, Harris says, is reconstructing history when one group of people—in this case, white slave owners—did their best to subjugate Africans to the point where they were nearly left out entirely.
David Shields , a professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and an expert in early American literature and food revivals, points to Emeline Jones as an example. Jones was a slave who started as a house servant and rose to the pinnacle of American culinary life with her extravagant multicourse meals. She earned admiration—and job offers—from Presidents Garfield, Arthur, and Cleveland, who sampled her fabulous meals of terrapin and canvasback duck, Lynnhaven oysters and crab salad, hominy cakes and fabulous confections, prepared when Jones worked as a cook at New York clubs in the late s.
Her story might have been lost if Shields had not dug through news articles and obituaries to re-create her life. Researcher Alicia Cromwell says one major challenge is "studying the silences," a phrase coined by Harris, which forces researchers to engage in detective-style deductions to piece together a more complete view of history in the absence of primary documents like diaries and letters written by slaves.
When working on her master's thesis, Cromwell buried herself in documents—legislative records, tax rolls, newspaper clippings, and primary sources other scholars had reviewed hundreds, if not thousands of times before—and was able to discern that female Muslim Nigerian slaves, working as fruit sellers and market vendors on behalf of their owners, helped shape the overall economic structure of the American South with long-distance price fixing and aggressive sales techniques.
Georgia chef and farmer Matthew Raiford is able to reconstruct his family's past through his farm, which has been in his family since He came to the North Carolina conference with a yellowed letter, a rare piece of history addressed from his great-grandmother to his grandmother, detailing how and where to plant corn, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, and watermelon.
His great-great-great grandfather Jupiter Gilliard, the man who purchased the farm, was born a slave in Bailey, back on Sapelo, agrees. Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Alicia Cromwell is a doctoral student at the University of South Carolina. She is a doctoral student at the University of Georgia.
All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Though rations could vary widely, slaves typically received an average of three pounds of pork per week. To hide the poor flavor of these cuts, enslaved people drew inspiration from traditional African cooking and used a powerful mixture of red pepper mixed with vinegar on their meat.
If barbeque is the heart of Southern cooking, cornbread is the backbone. Whether it comes white, yellow, soft, crusty, cool, hot, savory or sweet the debate over proper cornbread is almost as lively as the debate about barbeque , cornbread is a delicious accompaniment to any meal and is particularly useful in soaking up every tasty morsel of sauce or juice.
Introduced to settlers by Native Americans, corn was an early staple for Euro-Americans. Corn, however, had a particularly strong hold in the South. Corn was the most common ration for enslaved people in the South. Since enslaved people ate form of corn at almost every meal, they created a variety of ways to prepare it drawing inspiration from their Native American neighbors. In the seventeenth century, many enslaved Africans may have noticed similarities between their cultures.
Harris noted that drawings of Native Americans in North Carolina made by English colonist John White in the sixteenth century depict communal eating from a bowl, which was also a common practice in West Africa. To prepare this bread, Native Americans created dough from cornmeal and water, covered the dough with leaves, and then placed the covered dough in hot ashes to bake.
Irene Robertson, a former slave from Arkansas, had the following recipe for bread:. Cover with hot ashes. Polly Colbert, a former slave from Oklahoma, recognized the strong influence that Native Americans had on the large variety of corn recipes her and her family made.
Corn or corn meal was used in all de Indian dishes. Cornbread was also related to the cruelties of forced bondage. Enslaved people, who were given limited rations and limited time to eat and prepare their meals, became heavily reliant on cornbread.
Cornbread and its varieties were ideal for slaves who worked in the fields, because it did not require utensils, could be easily transported, and it could last a long time. Most slaves were given little or no breaks for meals. Developing from Native American influences in hands of enslaved cooks, cornbread varieties eventually made their way into the cookbooks of plantation households.
Inspired by boiled vegetables and one-pot meals common to West African cuisine, slaves often prepared a dish that is extremely similar to modern greens, but with a much more diverse repertoire of vegetables. Slave would gather and boil various kinds of leafy foods, such as collards, kale, he tops of beets and turnips, or wild weeds. In various instances, slaves boiled greens that were traditional to some Native American cuisines, such as marsh marigold and milkweed. Since slaves received such poor cuts of meat, their rations were often more ideal for flavoring foods, rather than serving as a meal itself.
Many archaeological excavations at slave quarters turn up small, fragmented animal bones, which suggest that slaves often used their small meat rations in soups or stews.
Cornbread, still a popular accompaniment to greens today, was often used to soak up this juice. Chilluns et cornbread soaked in de pot liquor what de greens or peas done been biled in.
Slaves never got much meat. Enslaved cooks who were in charge of preparing meals for the entire community constantly struggled with cooking for so many people with limited ingredients, materials and time. Greens were an ideal food since they could be cooked with little attention, in a single pot.
Carol Graham, a former slave from Alabama, noted this challenge:. Today, we like to enjoy sweet potatoes with lots of extra sweetness. We drizzle them with butter, sugar, cinnamon, toasted marshmallows or just go ahead and turn them into pie form. The sweet potato, however, was originally favored as a simple, more wholesome vegetable.
Sweet potatoes are hearty vegetables that grow well in less ideal soil, which made them an ideal crop for enslaved people and lower class whites. Spanish coins were accepted currency in colonial America. Partial values were created by literally cutting a circular coin into pieces.
This River Each spring, enslaved people used a large seine, or net, to haul hundreds of thousands of herring, shad, and other fish from the Potomac River. The fish were salted and packed into barrels. Some served as rations on the plantation. Washington sold the rest locally and internationally. Enslaved people also fished independently and harvested clams, oysters, and turtles from the river. Daily rations for an enslaved adult 1 quart cornmeal 5 to 8 ounces salted fish usually shad or herring.
Hunting Enslaved people hunted, fished, and trapped wild animals to supplement their diets and to sell. Botanical Remains Archaeology at the House for Families slave quarter unearthed remains from fruits and vegetables that enslaved people ate.
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